Unable to remove backup repostory previously used for replica seeding

[kevin.boddy]

Hi,

I had a strange issue when trying to remove an old backup repository today where VBR said the repository is used by a replication job.
I have a replication job that previously used backups stored in this old backup repository for seeding of the replica data when first setup.
The seeding was since changed to use existing replica seeding and the option to seed from backup was deselected.

The only way I was able to remove the old backup repository was to completely disable the replica seeding.
I would have thought that deselecting the option to use seeding from backups would remove any dependency on the old backup repository.

Is this expected behavior?

Thanks
Kevin

[HannesK]

Hello,
as long as the repository is in that dropdown field (even if disabled), it makes sense to me to forbid deleting the repository. Otherwise, what should the greyed out dropdown menu show?

Did you also try to select a different repository in the dropdown menu?

Best regards,
Hannes

[kevin.boddy]

Hi,

This does not make sense to me. If it is disabled then it should not be consider part of the job anymore.
Enabling it and then setting another backup repository then disabling it again allows me to remove the original repository.
I am not sure I understand the logic. Why would you want to remember the setting if you have explicitly disabled it.

Thanks
Kevin

[BackupBytesTim]

I'll add that, in my opinion, any "delete" or "remove" option should really just be a "delete" option. Right now it seems more like a "remove and reconfigure" or "uninstall" option. If the item being deleted is used elsewhere or involved in any way with other components, a warning can be issued and anything else may break, or have other things be similarly deleted. That is if I want to remove a server from an environment, I would like to be able to just delete it. And have any associated tasks be deleted, disabled, or just break and give errors as a result. The current method of blocking the removal of a server from an environment until all associated components or jobs are modified or deleted or uninstalled takes a lot longer to do.

It may not be a perfect use case, but we had a spare repository server used for testing that was added as "Backup Infrastructure" in our Cloud Connect environment. The server was wiped, but still showed in the VBR Console and it couldn't be deleted from the list because Veeam wanted to uninstall the components from the server. However the server no longer existed, so there was nothing to uninstall. But it still couldn't be just removed from the list. Had to manually modify the Veeam database if I remember correctly.

It would be nice if there was a "Force Remove" or "Force Delete" option that ignores any uninstall process or associated other aspects of Veeam, other related components, jobs that supposedly use the server, anything at all, and just removes it. If that breaks something somewhere then that can be addressed, but I think in most cases, like ours, we understand the potential consequences of deleting a server and in our case there were no consequences to be worried about, but Veeam just wouldn't remove it because of the need to verify nothing uses it anymore, which just couldn't be done because the server was previously wiped and had nothing to remove anymore.

[pesos]

fyi, I believe something related that rises to the issue of a bug or at least design flaw that should be addressed is that when you select the Seeding option for a rep job - even a job (as in our cases) where you never check the box to seed from a repository - the repository drop-down (again even though never once having been enabled and completely greyed out) auto-populates with the first repo alphabetically in the list. when we tried to remove this repo, we got an error saying it was in use with some of our replication jobs being referenced - which I thought was odd since these jobs were on unrelated hosts. so in order to clear it up, I had to temporarily check the box on the Seeding tab to enable seeding from repo, then select a different repo in the drop-down, then uncheck the box to grey it out again.